


A Grave to Fill

by Tainaron



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Pre-Fall of Overwatch, Pre-Recall, Trans Male Character, Trans Reaper | Gabriel Reyes, mention of self harm, passing mentions of transphobia and homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-19
Updated: 2017-07-19
Packaged: 2018-12-04 07:00:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11549949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tainaron/pseuds/Tainaron
Summary: If there's one lesson Gabriel has learned, it's that if someone's trying to take you down, you make them bleed for it.





	A Grave to Fill

**Author's Note:**

  * For [justaguywitharrows](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=justaguywitharrows).



The thing about omnics is that they're finite.

 

Limited.

 

They don't recruit, they don't reproduce. They don't individually even get craftier for all their sophisticated learning algorithms. Not with a singular God Program splitting its attention among many, prioritizing goals over individual unit survival. 

 

They don't know desperation.

 

Sweat ran into Gabriel's eye. The heat of Jack's shoulder was pressed against his own -- too tight, too close, they'd get in each other's way if they have to use this rubble to fire behind -- and neither of them dared move.

 

Twenty feet away on the other side of the rubble there was the whisper-sigh whirr of gears, the ever-present hum of power of the spider tank’s core.

 

Gabriel counted down the seconds slowly, silently. He tasted bile as the tank finished its enemyFound subroutine right on cue and the hydrologics kicked back in, the whine of each leg lifting and planting nearly deafening in proximity as it resumed its route.

 

After a moment, Jack's fingers brushed his chest and Gabriel started slightly, the rest of his senses flooding back, leaving him to realize he'd been staring blankly at a corpse in the street-- the unlucky bastard who'd kicked off the enemyFound routine to begin with. 

 

_ Fifteen seconds _ , Gabriel signed, trying to stay in the present even as his mind whirled into possibilities, outcomes, risk assessments.

 

Jack tapped his fingers twice in acknowledgement. 

 

Fifteen seconds gave Gabriel enough time to calculate the most likely attack routines they'd face. The enemyFound subroutine may have ended, but there was a cooldown before the spider tank would enter a lower level of alertness again. Not good. They needed to take it down sooner rather than later. On the other hand… this unit seemed to suffer from the early model fault of ceasing movement in combat so that its legs could properly brace itself against the kickback of its guns firing. It improved accuracy, sure, but there were disadvantages to being a stationary target with limited gun rotation.

 

_ From above,  _ Gabriel signed next.

 

Jack huffed, a nearly silent release of breath, but acknowledged with another series of taps.

 

Gabriel’s heart hammered as he tensed the muscles in his legs one after the other, trying to improve blood flow after being crouched for so long. Yeah, he didn't look forward to leaping out of a building onto the dome of a spider tank either.

 

But humans? Humans knew desperation. 

 

They made it fucking work for them.

* * *

 

Gabriel didn't need the news to tell him that they were losing.

 

Detroit was truly a no man's land, the South West was ravaged, and he half expected to see fire on the horizon when he looked out across the ocean.

 

Russia was burning. Germany was burning. The whole damn world was turning on its head.

 

Every damn omnic they shattered -- as finite, as limited, as  _ worthless _ as they were-- meant jack shit.

 

But fuck ‘em. 

 

If someone's trying to take you down, you make them  _ bleed _ for it.

* * *

Hilariously, that was probably why Gabriel kept being promoted. He couldn't make them bleed, but he could eradicate them.

 

Next best thing, right?

* * *

The rumors, though. Those were a shock.

 

Whispers even among the brass that things were going to change. There's be a new order, a new purpose, a new  _ hope _ .

 

It even had a name:  _ Overwatch. _

 

He'd have dismissed it, but suddenly he was being pulled in for a check up. Then another medical scan. All his records updated as though the whole SEP didn't already know him from how many eyelashes he had to how long it took him to take a dump. His formal clothes were replaced, his new shoes suspiciously shiny.

 

Jack smirked when he had brought it up.

 

He didn't even know why he had-- they were half undressed in Jack's bed and Jack had just started teasing off his briefs when it fell out of Gabriel’s mouth he half expected it to be the last time Jack saw them with how rapidly his wardrobe was getting rehauled.

 

But maybe that hope had infected him too. Maybe he needed to test it, share it. 

 

_ Things were going to change. _

 

And it was believe that or hold Jack in his arms and refuse to let go. Let the rise of panic ride him and have him wrap his legs around Jack's waist, drive Jack deep inside him until fear and worry gave way to discipline and exhausted satisfaction.

 

“Baby,” Jack murmured against Gabriel’s neck, lips warm and teasing, “Only the best for the best.”

 

Gabriel laughed-- but felt quelled, lighter.

 

It wasn't long after that that Gabriel started hearing  _ his  _ name after the murmur of  _ leading Overwatch. _

* * *

 

Mission blurred into mission. The troops they were with followed orders faster now, hope like a frenzy within them.

 

Things were going to change.

 

“Sir,” they started greeting Gabriel in hallways, eyes fever-bright with it. 

 

“Do they do that to you?” Gabriel asked Jack one day in the canteen, suspicious.

 

“What, greet a superior officer properly?” Jack snarked.

 

Gabriel gave him the dirtiest look he could muster. 

 

“Yes,” Jack admitted. Then a sly look came over him and he looked at Gabriel sidelong and said, “Yes,  _ sir _ .” in the exact stupid idolizing tone that really, really, it was Jack's own fault that Gabriel threw his pudding cup at him.

* * *

 

In the newspaper there was a photo of them stepping off a plane and making their way across the tarmac. Gabriel hadn't paid any attention to the paparazzi -- they'd been dressed to the nines in freshly pressed dress uniforms and the disconnect of the weight of it, so different from their fatigues or leisure wear, had been preoccupying him -- but someone else clearly had, because it had been delivered right to him at his room in Switzerland.

 

In it, he and Jack cut imposing figures: Jack closest to the camera, Gabriel behind, the painfully bright blue of a cloudless sky framing them and the wind caught sweeping Jack's hair back. He could just see the curl of Jack's hand around his hip in the photo, the place it always found itself when they walked side by side. 

 

Together they stared into the distance, to the side-- looking ahead to the  _ future _ , according to the headline.

 

Gabriel snorted.

 

But he kept the page.

 

And when Jack's parents wrote Jack a short, tense letter that amounted to a steaming pile of shit about how all their pride in their son, the soldier, was meaningless if he was a fag, well.

 

Gabriel bought a glossy print of the photo and framed it.

* * *

 

In Switzerland they met the other “great minds” of what would become Overwatch’s strike team.

 

Ana Amari.

 

Reinhardt Wilhelm.

 

Torbjörn Windholm.

 

Liao.

 

Officially, they met at a function. Dress suits. Polite greetings. Soft voices and safe subjects.

 

Gabriel actually met them properly when Ana dragged them all into her room, which was either far better stocked than Gabriel’s or else Ana was a stealthy fucker who'd managed to get off base already, because her dresser was lined with enough alcohol to make Gabriel's eyebrows rise into his hairline.

 

After Gabriel’s drink mysteriously refilled itself while he wasn't looking-- yeah, he'd put his money on  _ sneaky fucker. _

 

He got absolutely hammered and vaguely recalled talking to Torbjörn about omnic models, then Reinhardt proposing another toast, and then shit kind of dropped off but he woke up with Jack drooling on his chest and his head pillowed on Liao’s lap and his bladder burning. Which-- honestly, he'd do that again.

 

Apparently a sentiment they all shared, because they were back the next night. And the next.

 

And somewhere between Jack nursing a sore hand after trying to arm wrestle Reinhardt and Ana and Gabriel competing for top card shark he found himself thinking  _ yes, he could do this. _

* * *

 

The more they talked shop, the more they found excuses to spar, to sneak in their own exercises under the watchful gaze of idiots who thought it was more important that everyone said the right thing and looked important doing it ... the more it took shape in his mind. Team formations, strategy. Better ways to take down omnics, to make use of everything they had--

His mind whirled, dizzy and fast paced and drunk on possibility.

* * *

And when they were actually allowed in the field, Gabriel at the fore? He has never, ever been more right.

* * *

 

Gabriel spent hours looking at maps, at the charts of omnic strongholds. Beside him, Jack came in and out, his touchstone, carrying news about the reactions to their battles, invitations to drinks, dinner, games.

 

Then Liao died.

 

Gabriel's lips thinned. He found himself at the range, in meetings, planning their next move. But his mind? It started circling on thoughts of corpses with his friends’ faces. 

 

He remembered coming back to base after the funeral and standing in the rec room, exhausted and his throat sore from every word unspoken. He remembered Jack's hand resting on his stiff back and then Jack was guiding everyone out for a drink. Gabriel didn't remember much after that.

 

His strategies became more conservative, his viciousness ran deeper.

 

Hit fast and hard, leave no graves behind.

 

Omnics didn't need them after all.

* * *

 

Little by little.

 

Country by country.

 

Unit by unit.

 

Humans won.

 

Pity that omnics didn't feel desperation. Because Gabriel? He  _ really _ wished that they knew suffering, the fear of the inevitable before their end.

 

But victory would have to do.

* * *

 

The whole continent was lost in the fever of celebration. Hope. The chance for a future untinged by the specter of cold, emotionless death marching to your doorstep.

 

Gabriel started hearing rumors again. 

 

_ Overwatch,  _ they murmured.

 

But this time it wasn't as a momentary, last stand. It was as a beacon to usher in a new peace.

 

Peace was hard in some ways to imagine. He had to define it in other terms. A time for growth. Stability. Trust.

 

Once, he'd imagined a family somewhere in that image. Before he'd sold his body for a chance at making a difference in the war and they'd taken his uterus with no apology because they'd never tested the serum on anyone with his biology and they wanted to  _ eliminate complicating factors where possible. _ Before he had met Jack, who treated fatherhood with as much wariness and appeal as a land mine. In those absences there was an ache, but could be a growing pain.

 

Gabriel knew those spaces could be tended. Filled.

 

The war was over. He would sow seeds of another kind now, given the chance. Not destruction but… something. Something he was still yet wary of naming, of letting escape his chest and the small hours of the night where he lay beside Jack awake, but dreaming.

 

But Gabriel had forgotten: wartime leaders make poor figureheads in times of peace.

* * *

 

From the moment they were called in together, Gabriel had known something was afoot.

 

He rode the UN meeting out like a mission going sour: shoulders square, each breath even, Jack at his side.

 

Even all the accolades that preceded the news couldn't take the edge off it; he knew they were pulling something and so did they. Even Jack looked somewhat wary and he believed in eating up whatever shit the brass dropped.

 

_ The man we see leading Overwatch represents humanity at its finest,  _ they said,  _ the man we have put our trust in is a proven and natural leader, unparalleled in bringing others together-- _

 

Gabriel began to feel like a beauty pageant finalist. Who would be Overwatch’s next top model?

 

Obviously not fucking him if there was a wind up to it.

 

Still, it fell like a blow when it was  _ Strike Commander Morrison.  _

 

What  _ hadn't _ Gabriel given? Done? Sacrificed?

 

But.  _ But. _ There was a reason he was witnessing this. He felt it down to his bones the way he knew seconds before a shell fell, the way he threw himself back before oncoming fire hit.

 

And after Jack saluted stiffly and was allowed to take his leave they turned to Gabriel.

 

_ Blackwatch,  _ they murmured.

 

Suddenly, Gabriel knew he hadn't been passed over at all.

 

They had given him the job they always intended to.

* * *

That was the thing the others didn't understand. The thing that made their cautious looks and awkward congratulations grate when the news dropped to the team.

 

He gave them tight smiles in turn, not trusting himself to speak. Even his dinner plans with Jack turned stilted, Jack half caught in his own world and half apologetic, as though he feared that Gabriel thought he'd made a play for Commander behind his back.

 

There were only so many times Gabriel could say  _ it's fine. _

 

It wasn't. But it wasn't Jack's fault that Gabriel had forgotten wars didn't end at declarations and treaties. They didn't end at all. The God Programs would still need eyes on them, watching the territories ceded to them. There would be other powers that rose to fill the vacuums left behind. Already local resistance groups across the globe were turning into gangs as their primary enemy disappeared. 

 

“Jackie,” Gabriel said, cutting off Jack's cautious apology, “You just got promoted, Christ. At least eat your damn steak.”

* * *

 

Turns out, when you applied the same tactics to people as you did to omnics, you get a reputation fast.

 

 _Unyielding_ turned to _merciless._ _Precise_ to _inhuman_.

 

Gabriel had grown too used to human desperation to be surprised by it, but it made him sick to be on the other side of it. Especially when it was all too easy to put an end to.

 

Year after year it became less of a shock to wake up and think  _ Commander Morrison,  _ even if he never picked up the habit of calling him ‘sir’. He got used to there being blood on his hands, graves left behind.

 

Ana was Jack's right hand, but Gabriel belonged to another.

 

The UN’s dark hand moved without border or restriction. 

 

A dozen years of peace, fought for in shadows.

 

And then Gabriel met Jesse.

* * *

 

“Met" was generous, considering Jesse nearly took his eye out within twenty seconds of them coming face to face.

 

Fuck, Gabriel liked that kid.

* * *

 

Jesse McCree, formerly of the Deadlock gang.

 

Newest Blackwatch recruit.

 

Now  _ that  _ had gotten Gabriel dark looks. And not just from the teenager whose face was stuck in an expression that was meant to be sneering suspicion but just looked closer to constipation.

 

But Gabriel had seen the rest of the Deadlock gang buried, scattered or disappeared. And Jesse McCree? He was going to see him make something of himself.

 

“He's a child.” Ana said bluntly.

 

“Really?” Gabriel mocked, “Didn't realize. Thanks for the heads up. Also, doesn't your brat spend hours every week at the range?”

 

Ana gave him an unimpressed look.

 

“Firing a gun at a target and at a person are two different things, Gabriel.” Jack said cautiously.

 

“Today is full of revelations.” Gabriel marveled.

 

“You know what we're saying.”

 

He did, actually. They'd given the boy two choices: to disappear into a dark cell someplace until he was mysteriously found dead or to join Overwatch. And if Jesse stayed in Overwatch at large they would eventually try to soften the cruelty of that ultimatum by reframing it for themselves. That they were doing him a favor. They'd expect perfection and obedience in return for their guidance but secretly expect failure-- he was, after all, a brown kid with unfortunate morals and unfortunate circumstances. They would end up strangling him with a leash of condescending kindness.

 

Gabriel? The first thing Gabriel was going to do was get him a better pair of boots, a pistol, and a burger. 

 

When Jesse clawed his way into being respected it was going to be because he made the choice to pursue it on his own terms, in his own way.

 

And until then, Gabriel would be there to help steady his aim.

* * *

 

“That statue,” Jesse sneered at the reveal of the new monument of _Strike Commander Morrison_ , “is butt-fucking ugly.”

 

Gabriel cuffed his head reflexively.

 

“That's sir butt-fucking-ugly to you.”

 

Jesse threw him a quick grin, delighted and indignant all at once. It suited him better than that squinty too-cool look he'd been wearing for the last solid year. He had to scramble to keep his cigarette from falling on the ground too. Fucking hilarious.

 

“And you can't blame the sculptor for working with what he had.” Gabriel continued, “Don't make fun of tragedies.”

 

“If you think he's ugly, why are the you two of you fucking?”

 

Gabriel’s expression stayed exactly the same. That is to say: flat, unimpressed, and with an overture of ‘I'll give you a moment to realize why what you just said was fucking stupid’.

 

He let it all sink in for a moment and then--

 

“Ow!”

 

That time Jesse didn't catch his cigarette.

* * *

Gabriel's least favorite concession to his office was the routine medical examinations. They were partly due to his insistence on still taking missions himself and partly due to having been part of the SEP, the gift that kept on giving.

 

Dr. Zeigler-- Mercy -- was pleasant enough, but she particularly entranced by the SEP process and by what changes his body was still undergoing, decades later. 

 

“You are far fitter than a man of your age should be.” She congratulated him.

 

“Ouch, ‘a man of my age’-- you aim straight for the heart.”

 

She rolled her eyes, but reached for her clipboard anyway.

 

“Take the compliment. You're far fitter than even the Commander is. I wonder what factors…”

 

Gabriel laughed. 

 

“I'm still in the field. That's the difference between us.”

* * *

Gérard Lacroix’s wife vanished.

 

There weren't hysterics, but for a military operation it sure came close.

 

“All you've found on them is the name?” Jack demanded, exasperated. 

 

“I've got twelve groups on my radar that would have fucking loved to have done this. Four of them already took credit. The fact that I was able to actually identify who got Amélie in the last few hours was a damn miracle.” Gabriel griped.

 

“We need more than that!” Ana said. “We've already put out the call. If there's witnesses, if they try move her publicly--"

 

Gabriel grimaced. 

 

“From what we know about Talon, we're probably looking for a grave.”

 

Jack stood up and left.

* * *

 

Two weeks later Gabriel's men finally got their heads out of their asses and they made a breakthrough. 

 

She was being kept in a medical facility. Low security detail, likely kept on premises since she was snatched. Possibly being kept for blackmail.

 

It didn't matter. They'd found her. Gabriel gave the order to move in.

 

They brought her home.

 

Pity that it took them discovering Gérard’s body the next morning for them to realize that she wasn't Amélie anymore.

 

In hindsight he felt stupid for thinking that her desperation to be at her husband’s side again had been love. The shaking of her body, her wide eyes and clutching hands-- had that been fear of what she knew she'd do… or anticipation? Perhaps it had all been an act. Perhaps she felt nothing at all. For a long time Gabriel couldn't put it out of his head. Even the proof of conditioning they'd later found hadn't settled his nerves. Medical programs and brainwashing… her emotions emptied out through experimental procedures and a cocktail of steadily administered drugs until a drive to kill had been all that was left...

 

Gabriel hated being right.

 

There was a grave to fill at the end of it after all.

* * *

 

Jesse being of drinking age was a damn miracle.

 

It meant that when he'd done something astoundingly stupid Gabriel could drag him off somewhere private and get him hammered enough to let it out and work through it.

 

Especially when his problem needed to not be a problem yesterday.

 

“Are you  _ fucking _ serious?” Jesse seethed for the fifth time.

 

Gabriel had resolved not to drink, but he was slowly feeling driven to it.

 

“It's been the case the whole time you've known us. Get over it.”

 

“No,” Jesse refused. “What the fuck?”

 

“The only thing that's outrageous is that you tried to punch  _ the Strike Commander. _ ” Gabriel insisted. 

 

“He shouldn't  _ be _ the Strike Commander! That's the whole point!”

 

_ “Jesse McCree.”  _ Gabriel thundered, shoulders tight with tension, arms crossed as he loomed over him. “What happened nearly twenty years ago is  _ done _ . Having a punch up with your  _ Commander  _ about it is fucking stupid, even for you.”

 

Gabriel  _ never _ should have been stupid enough to let Jesse see the old newspaper photo he'd had framed from before the end of the omnic crisis.

 

His only excuse was… he'd forgotten about it. Deliberately.

 

He'd long since moved it from his desk to a drawer and then into his locked classified documents box when coming across it unexpectedly and seeing Jack's averted gaze had started to unsettle him. Then, like an idiot, he'd trusted Jesse to go crawling through the files to get him something and the busybody had asked Reinhardt about it when he'd gotten the chance and-- well. 

 

Finding out Gabriel used to be the Commander when Overwatch was just a ragtag fledgling team had clearly hit him deep.  Next thing anyone knew, Jesse had to be hauled off Jack.

 

Fortunately, Gabriel didn't need to know all the details in between in order to nip this in the bud.

 

“You get five minutes to get this out of your system.” 

 

Jesse spent the first three fuming, chest heaving under uneven, ragged breaths.

 

Then he spoke, quiet and venomous.

 

“It’s because you don't look right for the job, isn't it? They'd never make a statue with your face.”

 

Something in Gabriel seized up the way it had when he'd turned in his enlistment forms with a man's face and all the pages with F circled instead of M, for medical reasons they said. The same way he ached when the news feeds were clipped to show the Strike Commander and his second in command at functions, Gabriel carefully edited out from his place at Jack's side.

 

He took a deep breath.

 

“This ends with you apologizing and letting it lie, got that?” 

* * *

Nominally, Jack was supposed to sign off on certain kinds of missions and be the sole originator of others.

 

In reality, he and Gabriel had always understood that some actions were time sensitive or best kept away from the public face of Overwatch for accountability reasons. Paper trails were a liability.

 

Gabriel had never denied that he'd gotten his hands dirty for the human race, for the UN, for the people he… for Jack.

 

It had been necessary. It still was. 

 

It  _ worked. _

 

He extended the same principles to his men: do the job you need to do and let me watch your back.

 

Then Gabriel had offhandedly mentioned that his men had returned from the Australian Liberation Front a week before the ALF’s destruction of the omnic’s fusion core. 

 

Jack never outright asked if he'd had a hand in it.

 

Instead, Jack suddenly started requesting mission records. Missions where things had gone sour. Outbreaks of violence. Asking questions about who made decisions aside of Gabriel.

 

To start after nearly twenty years of keeping his nose clean of Gabriel's affairs? Without even the courtesy of a question? Just… the cold demand of a superior officer putting his subordinate under review without the dignity of acknowledging it directly?

 

It put his back up. Gabriel refused to name names. He leaned harder on his men, trying to see what Jack was angling at while also keeping them close under wing. He'd never given any orders to assist the ALF, just scout, but if there really were any double dealings, plants or saboteurs, he was sure he'd root them out. They were his men. His problem.

 

What a shame that a lack of consistent paperwork cut both ways, eh?

* * *

“You're under a lot of stress right now.” Mercy cautioned during more than one check up.

 

Gabriel was convinced that she was scraping the bottom of the barrel of medical excuses to speak with him regularly. In the last few weeks since the public info leak about Blackwatch he'd had booster vaccines for a dozen diseases he didn't even remember the names of and had given more blood for up to date record keeping than he had in years. He was pretty sure the pills he was taking were taking pills.

 

She wasn't wrong, but he also wasn't one to confide in a professional associate when he'd clammed up with the man he'd been with for the better part of his life.

 

“Are you experiencing any physical or mental symptoms?” She hedged, voice hovering between casual and comforting.

 

Sure. Sometimes he lay awake at night for hours with his heart pounding like a raging beast. He felt hot and on edge during the day. Sometimes he thought he'd snap the neck of the next person who talked to him. He shook with the need of it now and then, but always kept his hands to himself.

 

“Being under formal investigation by the UN… it can't be easy. If there's anything--”

 

“I'm fine. If that's all, doctor? I'm more than overdue to put myself to bed early like a good boy. Don't want to lose my dessert privileges.”

* * *

 

Gabriel waited in HQ with Ana and Jack as they sat on their hands watching the upswing in resurging omnic hostilities boil over to consume London.

 

He put his feet up and crossed his arms.

 

Funny, wasn't it, that once they'd all been on the frontlines together, Gabriel in the spotlight, and all of them backed by the UN? How the world turns. 

 

“I think,” he drawled, “That they're still a sovereign nation, right? Sounds very wholesome. Righteous. They must know what's best for the scores of people dying to omnics. We better stay out. Wouldn't want to step on any toes or subvert our orders, would we?”

 

Ana gave him a look that spoke volumes before she put a hand on Jack's shoulder and urged him to act against orders, to  _ do what must be done _ despite the consequences and chain of command. 

 

Good to know that Jack could be told to martyr his faith and obedience to the chain of command and still be framed as a hero while Gabriel--

 

While Gabriel left to have lunch. 

 

Fuck it. When the UN was done throwing him under the bus to keep their hands clean of the operation they'd put together he was pretty sure he wouldn't be eating anything half as good in whatever hole they forgot him in. Although, right now he was betting he knew exactly what it would look like: about four feet wide, six feet long, and six feet deep. Great view of dirt.

 

By the time he had finished eating excited rumors had already swept through the canteen that the Strike Commander had mobilized a team to act.

 

Gabriel turned in his tray and went to move the last of his things out of Jack's room.

* * *

 

Just a few weeks later Ana died on a mission to Widowmaker, formerly known as Amélie Lacroix.

 

Jesse took Gabriel to the same place he'd always dragged Jesse off to for serious talks, sat Gabriel down, and gave him a bottle of vodka.

 

Halfway into it he told Gabriel that he was leaving Blackwatch. Overwatch. Europe.

 

There was something sour going on and he wanted no part in it.

 

Gabriel found that once he started laughing he couldn't stop.

* * *

 

Waiting drove Gabriel crazy.

 

His heartbeat was a constant rhythm of sharp outrage and boiling anger.

 

The omnics rose again to slaughter humans in the streets, but this time it was wrong to destroy them.

 

The family he'd tried to make had been wrested apart, a work decades in the making torn away in blow after blow, like gunfire.

 

Or-- not. Things had festered long before that. This was ripping off the bandaid to expose the rot beneath, but even acknowledging that was its own blow when he'd tried to put it aside for so long.

 

It staggered him.

 

He cut long lines into his legs to mark the days, but they healed too fast, wrong somehow. Or else he'd lost track of time completely. He noted it, but didn't care.

 

What was taking so damn long?

 

Give him a reason. Give him a cause. Give him  _ closure. _

 

Just… don't let him linger like this.

* * *

 

And then the HQ exploded.

* * *

 

It didn't take him with it immediately, despite him being so close to the initial blast.

 

His ears were still ringing when Jack grabbed him by the shoulders. He didn't need to hear to know that the words Jack was mouthing were “What did you do?”

 

He also knew that breaking Jack's nose was  _ extremely _ satisfying.

* * *

 

It turns out that when you decide to have a dramatic fight in a collapsing building, you run the risk of the building taking you down before your opponent.

 

Rebar and concrete rumbled overhead and Jack and Gabriel sprang apart. Gabriel rolled, not far enough, not--

* * *

 

In the end Gabriel looked at Jack and thought:  _ I gave you everything. _

 

It ran through him hot and resentful and sharp. He had no breath to put to words even if he had the will to speak.

 

It was a pathetic thought to cling to, in light of everything. In spite of hating Jack in that moment so keenly it felt like loathing was his entire being. Then something in him snapped and he thought, no--

 

_ You took everything I had. _

 

He could feel Jack's hand on his face, but he couldn't focus on the shape of his mouth, the accusations there.

 

Then desperation overtook him and he thought it again --  _ you left me with nothing --  _ as love and remorse and pain and resentment escalated into pure sensation, urgency, and and-- his lungs were failing. He was suffocating, no drowning, he was-- 

* * *

 

Dead.

* * *

 

And then he woke up, eyes straining, breath catching, back arching. But even after he'd been sedated in that blind panic, when he realized he  _ lived _ , when each day turned into the next and shock faded and existing became something he expected--

 

It was still there, that thought, thrumming at the core of him. He felt like he was constantly drowning in the rising and falling tide of his own anger, but underneath that there was always the constant heartbeat of that last desperate thought. It was ran deeper than anything. It gave him clarity.

 

Focus.

 

He'd been shown the photos of his own corpse from Talon’s salvage operation. The corpse Jack had left to rot. 

 

What a pity for Jack that even the grave couldn't keep Gabriel from rising to extract his pound of flesh in return.

 

_ [If someone's trying to take you down, you make them  _ bleed _ for it.] _

 

He smiled to himself beneath his mask as he followed Widowmaker out the door of the facility.

 

_ Jack, Jack, Jack. _

 

_ You always wanted to put wrongs right. _

 

_ Let's start with this one. _

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> For missivesfromghosts
> 
> An attempt to reconcile various theories about the timeline with what we know from lore. If there's something you liked, please let me know.


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